With the advent of cloud computing, service providers face increasing storage needs to store information, such as text, pictures, videos, music, emails services, PC backup services, etc. Further, service providers require data resiliency and fast access on a continuously larger scale as the cloud grows. Service providers may add file servers, such as commodity or NetApp servers, with multiple hard drives to increase storage capacity while maintaining sufficient redundancy to reach the desired level of availability and integrity.
Typically, clouds that use many file servers for storage, e.g. storage farms, require truly distributed file systems that abstract file locations and volumes, presenting a single hierarchical name space with virtually-unlimited capacity to applications. A server-side of the distributed file systems is generally stored and executed at the file servers.